Architecture in Contemporary Literature

In 'The Lost Generation,' Hikmet Temel Akarsu's four-volume novel series, the first book, ‘The Age of the Ordinary’, discusses human situations, which include alienation, selfishness, loss of value, despair, and aimlessness of the individual in the age of neo-liberalism through architecture, the city, urban sprawl, rent economy, and architectural ethics. Zeytinburnu is the primary focus of the novel. The intense immigration and the increase in its population forced it to become a district of Istanbul. The main factor behind this intense immigration is that it is located in a good area for job opportunities. Migration from the rural to the city has been continuing for decades. It is a necessity to meet the accommodation needs of immigrants. The masses that came via migration could not build their temporary homes in the central areas. Zeytinburnu has been very convenient and has become an attractive district regarding employment opportunities due to a large number of leather factories and textile workshops. The author specifically touched upon the coexistence of various ethnic groups in the book. The author conveyed the conflict between the individual and the society, the decay of the system, and the transformation of the cities in the painful development processes in Turkey between the years 1968-1990 through his identity as an architect. He explained the changes in political mobilization, social polarization, and the effects of marginalization by presenting some sections of life, producing a realistic and critical novel on architectural ethics. He explained the drawbacks of the criteria of value given to people today, where the distorted characters created by the relationship between money and culture lead humanity, and the devastating results of the unavoidable growth of this understanding, and gave an example of a successful drama. In this aspect, “The Age of The Ordinary” is worth examining as a unique novel in architectural ethics. 

Austerlitz is the final novel of W. G. Sebald, one of the leading writers of German literature, published before his death. In this novel, Sebald deals with the life of the protagonist, Jacques Austerlitz, a Jewish scientist born in Wertach in 1934, in exile after being separated from his homeland. Austerlitz is an architectural historian. After choosing the academic path in his career, he learns about his past and begins to search for his real family following the death of his adoptive parents. Austerlitz was kidnapped from Czechoslovakia during the Nazi era of Germany and brought to Britain as a refugee and adopted by a family in Wales. The work begins with the scene where Austerlitz, while drawing at the Antwerp Railway Station in 1967, encountered the novel's unnamed narrator and began to talk. Later on, Austerlitz continues to meet with this anonymous narrator in various cities during his travels in Europe. While researching his family, Austerlitz also provides the reader with an analysis of the architectural structures in the city he is in. These cities are not randomly chosen places. While Sebald searches for his authentic self, it is not accidental that the architecture integrated into the story consists of structures from the post-war era. In this work, we analyze the information the author presents about the architecture of the buildings to the reader; European architecture is conveyed not through a single style but by considering different structures built in different periods. While making these analyses, establishing a connection with the European Jews during the Holocaust (the genocide of European Jews) was tried. While examining the story of Austerlitz, European architecture is treated in an integrated way into the storyline. The buildings and cities discussed in the novel, Austerlitz, are examined considering their periods and architectural styles. Of the buildings examined in parallel with the flow of the novel, some have undergone changes today, as well as those that we do not have information about. In the book, in which various buildings from different eras are discussed, the architectural analysis has been handled under three different headings in line with the flow of the story, and it is seen that the architectural styles and ideologies of the periods are effective in the buildings. While searching for his authentic self throughout the work, the protagonist, Austerlitz, has shed light on the dusty shelves of architectural history.

This study deals with Hermann Hesse's novel Steppenwolf, whose authorship stands out in the context of place. Hesse adopts the view that individuals should develop their self-identity, a sense of being competent and effective towards life and people in the fight against the crushing effects of the modern world, and brings this situation to the fore in his novels. In the Steppenwolf novel, the main character, Harry Haller, comes out in pieces with psychological character analyzes. The novel draws pictures in the mind of the reader about the place and character and depicts the personality traits by matching them with the place. Time (past, yesterday, today), place (lived, imagined, perceived, existing in mind) and user (personality, character, value judgments, perception, mood) exist in work as the intersection points of literature and architecture. The hostel, where the main character, who travels a lot, sees many places, and leads a dynamic life, temporarily stays, is the first place we come across in work. The spatial traces that the character overlaps with his past are overlapped with abstract feelings and nostalgia. It defines the desolate places in the city by making the invisible visible through emotions, what is in the mind, dreams, and blurred situations in mind. Emotions, feelings, and the loneliness of users are the reason they prefer to be in different places. The place exists as a situation where the subject and object require each other. The place is what the body experiences and lives as a part of the real world. The different auras of the places become a reality at the level of consciousness that users perceive and make sense of with their sense organs. Actions, behaviors, attitudes, and stances overlap with the place and the user. The mood of the user, namely, the subject, is effective in perceiving, interpreting, and living in the place. The interaction of the subject (user) and the object (place) tells us about the experience. In Steppenwolf, the place occurs in the context of the user and time as an inseparable part of life. 

Essentially an exploration of the Russian-born American author, Ayn Rand’s philosophy, and objectivism, her novel, ‘The Fountainhead’, holds a well-deserved spot in the architectural world. Although criticized harshly for a number of its literary aspects, the world-famous work emphasizes that integrity is one of the distinguishing qualities between individuals who have retained their sense of self and others who have succumbed to the ideas of equality, acceptance and altruism. This central idea is presented to the reader via the allegorical story of the archetypal “ideal person/architect,” Howard Roark, who epitomizes the tenets of Rand’s philosophy. Rand recounts this story through the depiction of four different characters, Keating, Toohey, Wynand, and Roark, whose lives and choices represent logical variations on her philosophical and psychological themes. As opposed to Roark, Keating is a conformist and surrenders his judgment for acceptance and success. Toohey is a power seeker with no tangible talent other than rhetoric, and Wynand, the only sound character in the novel, is a publisher of vulgar tabloids, yet possesses the innate essence to appreciate humanity’s noblest achievements. Architecture serves as an all-encompassing metaphor, and the protagonist’s architectural views represent his philosophy of life, just as buildings designed by Peter Keating and other characters represent their philosophies. The novel emphasizes that the basic principle embodied by the architect is inscribed in their work, while also reminding the reader that each individual continues to exist with such an absolute principle.

The new urban life requirements brought by the modern world system and the spatial experiences formed within this order are also reflected in the field of literature and art, and many literary and artistic works have been produced about these experiences. Concrete Island, one of these literary works, is a manuscript written by J. G. Ballard in 1974, which has a worldwide impact with its spatial, social, and psychological analyzes and is still the subject of investigations from different aspects today. In the novel about the experiences of architect Robert Maitland, who was trapped on a piece of land between highways in London due to a traffic accident, Ballard gives the reader a kind of “urban desert island” experience.It is called Concrete Island, but covered with green grass; this “lost place” is an area between the highways that divide cities and their lives. Trying to cope with the feelings of isolation and helplessness emotionally, as well as his physical injuries, Maitland falters with the conflict between the feeling of escaping from the island and the feeling of dominating the island. This search for domination takes on a different dimension after he realizes that he is not alone and that two outlaws, Jane and Proctor, live on the island with him. In the text, it is emphasized that the idea of returning to his previous life has become unbearable for Maitland, who has become increasingly dependent on the island, and on the other hand, the pleasure and curiosity of making new escape plans are at the forefront. In this study, which aims to examine the spaces and events fictionalized in the novel in line with architectural and interior analyses, the events experienced in an urban area, which can also be called a lost space in the modern urban order, are discussed in the context of the concepts of privation and domination. 

“The Fifth Child” by Doris Lessing tells the story of the ordinary happy life of a large family, changing to a different dimension when the fifth child joins their life. This versatile study, in which Doris describes the life of a large family, full of successful descriptions and analyzes the characters in depth, is a deep work that is rich in architectural places and contains many sociological, pedagogical and psychological elements. The richness of the places in the novel becomes more visible with the successful narration of the author's descriptions. These include the main place at the party where David and Harriet first met, the office where they looked at each other and talked to the full, the porch where they held hands on the day they bought the house, David's room that he called his real home in his childhood and other places of his own, the building where Ben was taken by a pickup truck, the main place of the house around which a large happy family gathered, the guilty bedroom that drove fertility, and a house with a garden with three stories, including an attic, bought because it matched their dreams. Only a concrete, abstract or non-objective place has always existed as a social reality with all its dimensions and forms. The bonds we establish individually with the space, and the experiences we have, are effective in the placement of the space both in our perception and in our memory. In work, there are important indicators of how the perception of the same place is changed for different people. The author's analyses on these points refer to Lefebvre's spatial triad dialectic: perceived, designed and lived spaces.

“The Garden of the Finzi-Continis” is a novel by Italian author Giorgio Bassani, published in 1962 and received great acclaim. The work bears autobiographical traces from his life. It can even be said that the author tells his own life story with flashbacks, reminiscences, and reminders from the Jewish community in his own city, Ferrara, since the cursed year 1938. Although the issue in the main “frame” is a touching, sensitive, shy, and sad love story of our young protagonist, who is in love with the frivolous Micol, an upper-class bourgeois girl, the author draws us a very successful, intellectually deep, sensitive and descriptive panorama of the period. Although the story is knitted around this central axis, we also see how the course of social and political events changed in the panorama of that period, how the fascist administration, which blasted in heavy and multiple waves, disrupted people's lives, and what happened to the Jewish community, which had led a calm, quiet, modest and introverted life within the historic city wall of Ferrara. While reading this story, we have an extensively descriptive architectural guide of this upper-class bourgeois family in the context of traditions, customs, lifestyle, and residential spaces. While ‘The Garden of Finzi-Continis’ has prepared its plot in this manner, it tends to reflect the period holistically, with its richness of narration, depth in descriptions, sensitivities regarding the panorama of the period, and sophisticated spiritual analyses, rather than relying on a complex fiction. For this reason, it cannot be regarded solely as a comprehensive historical script of the social and political events of the period, but also it gives the adventure of a historical Italian city with its intellectual details. Frequently, there is also a place for architectural depictions among these details. If we take a moment to look at the geography of Italy, full of architectural wealth, by leaving the novel aside, which looks at the architectural and social panorama of 1930s Italy in depth and detail, we can see that the historical remains of the cities of Ferrara and Bologna in the Emilia Romagna region of Italy, the frequently mentioned Venice and the Po Plain described in the book, the architectural heritage and the perception of the said society living together with these remains even today, is always interesting, even striking. Moreover, those who visited the Emilia Romagna region of Italy, Bologna, Ferrara, Ravenna, Cesena, and Rimini, directly saw the level of architectural preservation and the magnificence of the architectural heritage in these regions. The novels in the style of Finzi-Continis’ garden, on the other hand, are adorned with precious architectural elements that make a qualitative contribution from the literary field to this conservation culture in the architectural field, despite the deep sadness and sorrow they reflect and the rich elaborated style and sophisticated literary structure they bear. 

Literary texts offer an alternative spatial experience to the reader with the atmospheres they construct. The God of Small Things (novel) casts the reader into a dynamic space with its (spatial and corporeal) depictions and fiction. It allows us to read architecture through the atmosphere that diffuses in a non-directional attitude. This diffusion breathes life into space and makes it an organism. What sets the boundaries of the atmosphere is the comprehensibility of experienced feelings. When entering a room, a specific atmosphere is felt. However, it is difficult to determine where precisely it is. Atmospheres diffuse into space like haze, clouds of a certain tone of feeling. Similarly, the smell is also not positioned in space in a way that allows us to determine where it is. Smell plays a crucial role in the tone of feeling in the space. In addition, alternative spatiality and architectural components provide potential discussions regarding architectural atmospheres. However, the scope of the study is limited to space as an organism and the affective side of smell. The study aims to examine the spaces of The God of Small Things through their atmospheres. Arundhati Roy demonstrates the importance of space as an organism in the atmosphere and smells with a diffusive character. In her novels, she constantly reconstructs the atmosphere suspended between the subject and the object through the inspiration of architecture.

The novel of Orhan Pamuk, “The Red-Haired Woman,” describes the years when Istanbul's urban development, change, and the transformation began thirty years ago. This process is told through the story of the traumatic love that a high school student, Cem experienced in the town of Öngören near Istanbul. The Red-Haired Woman is a novel about the adventure of change, development, transformation, urbanization, and architecture of Istanbul from a mega-city to a global city. The novel contains rich themes: traditional building art/ contemporary building art, suburbs /center, urbanization/ inability to urbanize, and East/ West localization/ globalization. Infrastructure services, such as water, sewerage, roads, electricity, and social facilities, are lacking in the regions of Istanbul that have not yet experienced the urbanization process. People build their own houses according to the culture of the rural areas they come from. The need for water is supplied from the wells drilled. Neighbors unite among themselves and collect money and are looking for a well master to dig a well. In the 1970s, when immigration accelerated in Istanbul, there was a high demand for masters; they also trained many apprentices, and well-mastering was a lucrative branch of the profession. Slums were wildly proliferating around industrial areas and factories. On the other hand, well-mastering is one of the fields of construction that has been around for thousands of years. In Istanbul, the masters of this ancient art used to bring water to the districts without infrastructure. There were no opportunities to dig wells with machines in those years. Well-mastering requires deep knowledge, intuition, and patience. The master's knowledge and intuition of geology, knowledge of construction, structure, materials, and shaping, as well as his relationship with his apprentices, were part of his profession. The author tells about the urbanization adventure of Istanbul through the drawn structure, the lost traditional life and art of building slum areas, and the background of the processes of adaptation to the city. With the rapidly disappearing traditional architectural texture and urbanization of the suburbs, the antecedents of the process in the transformation of Istanbul into a megacity and then a global city are given with clues in the first part, while the remarkable transformation of the city is shown with all its consequences in the second.

In the novel of NW by Zadie Smith, the multiethnic and multicultural social structure in northwest London is narrated through the story of four city dwellers. The aim of this study is to examine the story of the novel through the lenses of urban architecture in relation to the psychological, social, and environmental themes of the plot. For this aim, firstly, a brief introduction of the novel is presented. After the introduction, the main subject of the story, its main characters, and the relations between them are explained. In this section, characters of various ethnic backgrounds living in the economic difficulties brought on by metropolitan life, and the relationship between the different classes they represent, are examined. Then, the themes that the author fictionalized through the relations between the main characters by referring to the field of environmental psychology and sociology are extracted from the story. In the next section, the main characteristics of the streets, parks, and especially the council housing of the district that forms the urban architecture of northwest London in the background of the story, are summarized. Moreover, the main themes that were presented in the previous section are associated with the spaces and the architecture in which they pass. This association is made by examining the relationships of the characters who are in motion in spaces with each other, formed by the occasional intersection of their paths from place to place, and their experiences with space, place and institutions. In conclusion, it is determined that the author embodied many social and psychological themes in urban architecture, including council housing, which constitute the scenario of the story. These themes correspond to the fields of environmental psychology and sociology, such as racism, interracial relations, social class, social pressures, class distinctions, inequality, ethnicity, immigrants, identity, belonging, privacy, attachment to place, marriage, love, gender roles, violence, crime and mobility are put forward. Finally, the results show the following: The urban architecture, including council housing, affects the sense of belonging and identity of the people living in the area; housing perceptions and expectations of people differ from each other in accordance with their social class; and housing is considered an indicator of prestige and social class in the lives of the protagonists.

Paul Auster’s 2010 novel, Sunset Park, is set in the flatlands of Florida as well as the streets of Brooklyn in New York City. It is an emotional reflection on the ideas of home and homelessness, belonging, loss, death, grief, trauma, guilt, and love, and how these concepts are defined and reiterated by the transformation of space. The chapter provides a descriptive analysis of the architectural features of multiple settings and moves on to a discussion of various significant locations in the novel by implementing the six principles of the heterotopia by Michel Foucault. While presenting his principles about heterotopia, Foucault assigns each a specific function. Heterotopias, according to each of his principles, represent an emotion that accompanies this function. Miles, the protagonist of the novel, who suffers from the emotional repercussions of a traumatic loss, joins three young prospective artists in transforming a building into a temporary living space for themselves. The building is situated in the Sunset Park neighborhood, where there is a dominance of neo-Renaissance and Romanesque architecture. The neighborhood is known to be a place where multiple ethnic minorities exist together. The common point of all the characters who dwell in the house illegally is that they are experiencing a critical transitory period in their lives. 

The Prague Cemetery, a novel by the Italian writer, Umberto Eco, was published in Italy in 2010. The novel deals with the emergence of the Protocols of the Sages of Zion, which is claimed to constitute the justification for the Jewish genocide. The novel is based on proven historical facts. Only the main character is fictional; the rest of the characters in the book are historical figures. The events mentioned in the novel occurred between 1897 and 1898. The main character of the story, Simone Simonini, is a forger hiding under the guise of an antique dealer. Simonini's life and views on Jews were shaped by the words of his grandfather, who raised him. After graduating from law school, his grandfather died, and he started to work for the notary public, who carried out the inheritance process. He exposed the illegal activities of the notary public and had him imprisoned. Thus, he replaced the notary public and continued to carry out the same illicit activities as his predecessor, preparing forged documents, perjury, and even becoming a murderer in the future to destroy evidence. Simone Simonini lives in an apartment above his vintage shop in Impasse Maubert. One day, he discovered a dark corridor leading from his apartment to the apartment next door. The discovery of this apartment marked the beginning of a series of mysterious events. Simonini came across the name Reverend Dalla Piccola on his writing desk. The events that took place after that were conveyed to the reader through the writings of the two characters to each other. Later, Simonini discovered that Dalla Piccola was a split personality he had created. The house where the character lives and the Prague Cemetery have the characteristics of perceptual space in the novel and are shaped according to the character’s mood swings. At the end of the novel, Simonini fulfills his raison d’etre and completes the “Protocols of the Elders of Zion”, a forged record of the secret meeting of Jewish leaders in the Prague Cemetery. He even orchestrates a small explosion in the Paris underground system to increase its credibility. 

Spatial perception is a process for understanding the spatial environment by conveying information from the stimuli. Stemming from the interaction of humans and their built environment, it is influenced by several subjective and objective factors. Spatial experience, on the other hand, is related to time-duration-familiarity, meaning-interpretation- impressions of the space in addition to sensory and bodily perceptual experiences of the environment. As an impressive medium to reveal the perceptual aspects of space, Paul Bowles' famous novel, “The Sheltering Sky”, tells the story of three characters: Kit, Port and Tunner. The book consists of three parts: Tea in the Sahara, The Earth's Sharp Edge, and The Sky. The trip to North Africa, which the protagonists think will distract them from everything, including the remnants of war, “dissolves” the makeshift relationship through the perceptual mysteries of the Sahara. Bowles embeds the desert as a great allegory in this painful story of travelers who are on a journey of searching for the meaning of their existence. This study aims to reveal that the desert here is directly connected to the sense of non-place through its extraordinary sensory and perceptual dimensions. A phenomenological perspective is suggested and used in an efficient way to understand the lifeworlds of the protagonists in this novel. With the help of a phenomenologist’s point of view, the events, situations, atmospheres, ambiences, conditions and requiems of tenderness of human existence in the world blending in this marvelously told story could be reread. 

At the very beginning of the twenty-first century, the literary scene all over the world was shaken by the echoes of a best-seller. A novel published in America, the origin of industrial literature, was breaking incredible sales records, reaching millions of copies, and was translated into almost all languages of the world. This book is a novel that internalized all elements of art in the post-modern era in the most professional way and puts the arts of painting and architecture at the center of its viewfinder: It is “The Da Vinci Code” by Dan Brown. All elements that should have a place in a post-modern work of art were carefully spread in The Da Vinci Code. Elements such as conspiracy theory, esotericism, theology, cryptology, popular history, and intrigue, which are among the elements of the most significant interest in the age we live in, were fed into the work in such a taste and dose as if they were applied with the skill of a master cook. While the book proceeded with short and easy-to-read chapters and interruptions that transferred the element of curiosity to the next section, decorated with the techniques of the writers of the media age that excited the readers' excitement, it attracted attention to the architectural spaces and cult works of art that it plateaued itself. Even though Leonardo da Vinci's The Last Supper is its “leitmotif,” some significant European cathedrals, the Louvre Museum, and some monumental structures in London and Paris comprise the spaces where the novel takes place. In other words, in the novel, The Da Vinci Code, the art of architecture occupies an extensive space in addition to such branches of plastic art as painting and sculpture. Temple Church, the Church of Saint-Sulpice in Paris, Westminster Abbey, Rosslyn Chapel, the Château de Villette, the Eiffel Tower, the Arc de Triomphe du Carrousel, and the Louvre Museum are the most important of these. Although Dan Brown's worldwide best-seller is a product of popular literature, it creates an attraction with its theme around monumental structures, architectural works, works of art, legends, myths, and theological parables that are of great importance in the history of humanity and talks about the creations that are essential, encouraging, instructive, developing and inspiring for architects, within the framework of qualified research. Considering this aspect, it is a valuable novel that should be at the center of the attention of architects.

In this article, written on the basis of Haruki Murakami's work “After Dark”, along with the architectural layout, the author's living environment, what he wants to present to the reader, original views, new perceptions of life, and features of the period are examined from many angles. The main goal is to make sense of the identity of Dark and its relationship with architecture. It is a work in which the transformations of space can be examined by personal and social habits, acceptance after dark, and the effect of lifestyle on architecture. In this study, the work was first analyzed with the effects of postmodernism from a spatial perspective. Modernity, and postmodernity discourses have an important place in order to be able to respond to discussions about making sense of the transformations witnessed on Earth through Japan. Standing out from the age of Enlightenment, modernism has spread across all stakes of social structures, such as economical structure, cultural processes, and political life, and has taken a primary role in shaping the social structure until the 20th century. The discourse “postmodern” has taken its place in academic discussions of the social structure, which has been reshaped by the development of communication and transportation technology after the second half of the 20th century. These perspectives on urban discourse and the role they play in the organization of urban space constitute the main hypothesis of this study. It was thought that it would be useful to examine the transformations caused by modern and postmodern discourses in the social structure based on their reflection on urban space. In addition, the vitality of the characters has been added to the novel, where every detail is given to the reader, from the description of a place to their music. The vitality of the characters is an immersive work. After Dark became one of the rare works of the postmodern movement that can be studied in literature and architecture.

The plot of the book Night Train to Lisbon is about Raimund Gregorius, a teacher of ancient languages at a high school in the city of Bern and known for his monotonous and ordinary life, who begins to question his life after an unexpected event he experienced and his search for his own identity. In this quest, Gregorius comes across the book of Doctor de Prado, who had similar inquiries but lived in another time and place. The book takes him to Lisbon, the city where de Prado lived. The book is read as an inner journey that Gregorius made himself, following the footsteps of the place where Doctor de Prado lived, along with/beyond his physical journey to another city. In the book, the question is whether it is possible to have a different kind of life, a different way of being in the world, beyond the limits of the life that the individuals draw about their life, outside the life patterns they have established. In this sense, the article reads this journey of Gregorius through the effect of being in another place – as the city and space – and the experiences gained in this city on identity and belonging. The memories and experiences of someone who lived in another city, a journey made in the language and history of the city, and the effect of the inner feelings and traces of one's own feelings on the identity and belonging of the individual are being questioned. At the same time, inferences are drawn about the mutual dialectical effect of identity and space—the spatial counterparts of the elements that make up the identity of the individual and the reflection of spatial features on the individual's identity. The chapters of the book are approached within this framework and constitute the titles of the article. Part I, The Departure, is read through the individual's journey to another city in the pursuit of his own identity and different life possibilities; Part II, The Encounter, is read through the encounter of another identity and belonging area; and Part III, The Attempt, is read through the possibilities of being in different areas of belonging in other places and times. In Part IV, The Return, Gregorius returns to the city of Bern. But at the end of his journey, it is seen that he has developed a sense of belonging to both cities. 

The book by Charles Belfoure titled 'The Paris Architect' is more than a novel placed in the historical framework of a city that has inspired artistic creations for many centuries. It is set in the Second World War yet brings a unique perspective to a period that has often been chronicled. The author juxtaposes the fate of a city and its community with an individual. It also addresses the issue of the responsibility of the architectural profession while guiding the reader through the different layers of the urban texture. Thus, it analyses the relationship between the individual and society in the context of architecture. This essay provides a brief introduction to the novel.

The Great Fire of London is the debut novel of British poet, novelist, and biographer Peter Ackroyd. The novel gives an opportunity to make a thematic start to the author' s oeuvre full of London and contains many leitmotifs that will be the cornerstones of the author's later work. Ackroyd insists that his novels are mostly from the English tradition, although his novels have a postmodern structure. In these works, which are written with a labyrinth-like writing technique, it is not clear where the fiction begins and where it ends. There is not much of a difference between poetry, literary text, or biography for Ackroyd. The result that enables the transition between these genres is that all these genres consist of a language game. Language games are multilayered for the author, and the reader encounters onomastic, formal or symbolic palimpsests in the narrative. Ackroyd’s style of writing is psychogeographic, and his characters consider the city of London a perfect fit for psychogeographic adventures. This urge to articulate denotes an antimodern behavior pattern in the search for a tradition that is part of a continuity against modernism

Umberto Eco, one of the leading authors of contemporary world literature, is an important Italian writer, medieval historian, and semiotics expert, mostly known for his novels such as The Name of the Rose, Foucault's Pendulum, and The Prague Cemetery. Until his death in 2016, he wrote many works in the fields of history, art, aesthetics, and communication, as well as in the field of literature. The book “Medieval Ages II – Cathedrals, Knights, Cities” is the second of four volumes that examines the medieval period comprehensively in every aspect, from religion to politics, from inventions and discoveries to visual arts, from daily life to architectural living spaces in urban and rural areas. This invaluable medieval corpus has been meticulously crafted by esteemed writers, each of whom is an expert in their fields, and brought together by Eco's deep knowledge and experience. Although a chronological division is generally seen as a method, while different topics are handled by different authors with intersections, repetitions, and intertwinings, a system that does not contradict and is never dull but reinforces the issues and allows them to be remembered, is followed: This valuable work, which introduces the Middle Ages in all its aspects, is an indispensable resource for everyone interested in history and art and the development of understanding of space at the scale of buildings to the city and regional level. A bedside encyclopedia... The Middle Ages is known as a period defined as the dark age in the Age of Enlightenment when the church and imperial sovereignty disputes caused the public to pay high costs, and epidemics broke out and raged throughout. Despite all the harsh living conditions, Umberto Eco draws attention to the fact that much progress had been made in the darkness of this age and that new inventions were realized that would facilitate the daily life and production activities of human beings. In parallel with wars, conquests, political upheavals, and cultural struggles, medieval settlements also underwent a physical change and transformation. It was an age in which art, especially architecture, showed its glory. The book “Cathedrals, Knights, Cities” is a comprehensive, holistic source of information about the Middle Ages. It is a fundamental work for everyone related to art, especially architects. It is also an opportunity to reclassify the established vocabulary and revise common misconceptions.

Love in Symi is a nouvelle that flows in the background of the hopeless love between the “X” generation and the “Y” generation people, the heartsore love held captive by technology in an original architectural setting. The author is Hikmet Temel Aksu, a writer who has studied architecture. With its main story reflecting the emotions of the chivalry era, set in the Greek Dodecanese Islands of Kos, Symi, and Rhodes, Love in Symi occurs on a plateau with Mediterranean architecture as the background. The protagonist of the story is Elsa and the author himself. The work tells a bittersweet love story, as well as the architecture of the Greek islands, with a touristic feeling and journey. The journey starts from the island of Kos, across from Bodrum. The uniqueness of Hippocrates's living here, the island finds its place with beautiful beaches, monasteries built on high hills, gastronomic restaurants, and intense architectural descriptions. The second island, Symi, is considered the most striking in architecture and the most unique among other islands. It is one of the most beautiful examples of island architecture, with the settlement of the city on steep volcanic hills, its houses with white window pediments painted in orange and yellow on the outside, and its characteristic stone architecture. The island of Rhodes, the last island mentioned in the novel, immerses the reader in the atmosphere of the place with intense architectural depictions. Two or three of the giant cruise ships can simultaneously anchor in the port of Rhodes, which is surrounded by a medieval castle, and on the UNESCO cultural heritage list. Since it is one of the main attractions of such a busy tourism industry, the criticism regarding the brutal mistreatment of Rhodes's historical architecture is also notable in the nouvelle.

 Amin Maalouf or Emin Maluf, was born on February 25, 1949, in Beirut. The author, who writes his books in French, has lived in France since 1976. The author was awarded the Goncourt Academy Literary Award in 1993 for his novel, The Rock of Tanios (Le Rocheɾ de Tanios). His books have been translated into more than 40 languages and have reached a wide audience in France and in many other countries. Amin Maalouf tells the history of the Middle East to Westerners in their own language. He owes his fame to historical novels. His first book, The Crusades through the Eyes of the Arabs, played an important role in his recognition as a great writer. Ports of Call, one of Maalouf's important works, tells the story of a person who was born in Lebanon, then went to France, took part in the resistance movement, and then returned to Lebanon to be greeted as a hero. The author states that his source of inspiration for this book was the life story of a person he met towards the end of the 1960s. It describes the divisions experienced in Palestine and Lebanon during World War II and offers implicit solutions to the events in the Middle East. This study aims to provide a spatial analysis of the locations where the events of the story take place.

McKibben, as an environmentalist dedicating his life to raising awareness about nature, refers predominantly to topics about climate change in his book titled “The End of Nature”. This book has also been called the first book on global warming written for a general audience, since the arguments supported by both numeric data and findings of the author’s daily life notes make it easier to read. Before discussing the aim of the book, this review considers the passionate way of an activist from the early days of the author’s private life to his successful education, life, and environmental campaigns. In the following part, the answers to the climate change problem are discussed beyond the matter of warming. Moreover, McKibben’s future predictions are addressed due to related political issues of the new world. The last part is more likely to refer to the architectural context. Clues on how these issues can relate to architecture are primarily sought in education than professional life, and strategies focused on raising awareness are mentioned. Architects should have to consider the environmental issues that have been raised in the book in order to give less damage to Earth. Since space issues such as land use, structural decisions, and material choice are all directly referred to energy consumption, several questions are suggested to ask before production to conduct the system in an efficient and more nature-friendly way. 

Written by Mark Mazower, a history professor at Columbia University, the 633-page giant work, “Salonica: City of Ghosts”, surpasses its feature of being one of the most magnificent works of the genre’s monography. It reaches the level of a superior literary work as a permanent historical architectural script. The book is not only the product of many years of research and is supported by strong visuals and an index, but it is written with competent and even superior eloquence. The work has gone far beyond being a giant monograph due to its stylistic and dramatic structure that surpasses an academic study in literature. Together with the literary arts and human conditions, it has masterfully displayed throughout the narrative; it has turned into a tragic bildungsroman of an ancient city. Mark Mazower wrote the story of this exciting city, which has great symbolic and cultural values and has been the scene of significant events both in modern history and in the “recent” (!) history of the last five hundred years, focusing on the years between 1430-1950. These dates mark when the city was captured by the Ottomans and continues to the aftermath of the Second World War. As every individual from the Ottoman geography covering vast lands knows very well, Thessaloniki contains significant and unique characteristics in terms of architecture and culture as well as sociological and historical aspects. Reading the detailed story of the city of Thessaloniki, a vital cultural, political, and economic center, which has been invaded, burned, and destroyed many times throughout history and has suffered countless disasters such as war, occupation, fire, and genocide, from Mark Mazower's book, is an extreme enriching act that gives awareness of history, culture, and architecture. Mark Mazower describes all this with a scientific eye, a competent literary style, and a socio-economic and political background to the fullest extent. All this richness of narrative turns the book into a precious work that tells about the fate of a city. Every architect should read it carefully.

The book we will discuss is one of Harvey's most important works on the right to the city and Marxist theory and consists of 7 parts. This article aims to guide the readers via a summary of the content of the book. The introduction begins with the narrative that complex and stratified social classes have a greater impact on the transformation and revolution of cities than the working class employed in industrial spaces. In his book, Harvey repositions Marxist Political Theory as a basis for cities generating capital accumulation. This argument surpasses the general and misconceived belief that such effects are produced by factories and the labor force. The rationale for this argument is an economic one, depicting the importance of the capitalism of land, land-rent, intellectual capital and speculation rather than commodity production. This commune is a very different kind of proletarian revolution, in which much of the leftist political chambers see an Avant-Guard spirit. In the preface part, Harvey draws attention to the increasing urbanization of the globe, which is frequently discussed under the effects of the post-colonial era. In the capitalist system, the urban process is fraught with extraordinary political turmoil, whose roots can be revealed in part through an examination of how urbanization is shaped by its interlocking concrete abstractions and is shaped directly by the circulation of money in space and time. The tensions between the individuality of the act of spending money and the class experience of earning that money divide the social and psychological foundations of political action. The book concludes with ideas portraying an unexpected unwillingness to put heavy importance on the political agency role of rioters, like the Wall Street Occupation. Harvey's theoretical artisan is highly valuable in putting the complex economic processes underlying urbanization and the inter-flows of capital in the form of urban space. Harvey comprehensively puts the notion of surplus capital, primarily through creative destruction - the large-scale restructuring of cities – in urbanization's central role. Rebel Cities is a needed book for a renewed case, a city as a medium for urban rights claimed and possessed by the public rather than forces of capitalism.

Patti Smith's M Train resembles a mental train that stops at any station, at any time interval. With ambition and inspiration, Smith takes the reader on a journey between dreams and reality, past and present, books and country. Smith’s whole life can be considered a work of art. She is an unconventional artist who reveals herself in her relation to space. In an intertwined experience of time and space, we find Smith reminiscing on life, loss, and pains of creation. Smith's analogy of a clock with no hands refers to a frozen time, a memory where the past and the present coexist. This memory also contains the ties that a person establishes with their physical environment. The subjectivity of experience creates differences in the perception of a space. But how is it possible to resist time in our age of speed? This is what Smith presents to her readers: an infinite present. Smith's memory resists its loss, just as architecture resists time. Architecture witnesses personal and social tragedies and freezes them in time. In this sense, architecture turns into a memory remnant, a trace, and survives by creating a bridge between the past, present, and even the future. Smith's experience of the past in the present also makes it possible to interpret the relationship between architecture and experiential time. In this context, architecture reveals memory space and becomes an important factor in the reproduction of memory. Moreover, it can help revive and maintain memory by constructing new forms of expression. In this regard, personal and social memory emerges as a subject that should be emphasized in architectural research.

Since architecture has a fundamental place in many aspects of life rather than just the construction of buildings, it necessitates an interdisciplinary view to comprehend its influences and consequences fully. After the design and construction process of the buildings is completed, they lead a different life in everyday life. Therefore, the literature contains essential potential about the adventures of architecture in daily life. It witnesses the neglected life of the discipline of architecture, which is confined to certain areas. On the other hand, science fiction literature expands these boundaries to timeless areas due to its themes based on the imagination of the future. One of the masterpieces of science fiction literature, Philip K. Dick's novel “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?” is an important work that should be consulted, as it gives architects a chance to examine today's world from the perspective of the past and the future, both in terms of being far ahead of its time and in terms of space imaginations. The article aims to ask what kind of parallels the spaces in the novel have with the social life of the characters and what the dystopian relationship with technology will transform architecture into. In this context, it seems that spaces have lost their importance in line with the relationship that the characters have established with technology. In the novel, where life is made bearable only by several technological possibilities, we come across the vision of a dystopian planet in which its ties with Earth are irrevocably severed. Architecture, which cannot go beyond the collage of the past on such a planet, appears as a faint shadow in the pleasing world of technology. As a result, the architectural setup plays a vital role in increasing authenticity as well as event and character setups in science fiction literature. It is seen that the one-sided relationship with technology reduces architecture to a simple décor of a history of an emulated past. This ascribed role undoubtedly embodies implications for the present and the future. What kind of problems will be caused by looking at architecture from the perspective of the imposition of a limited present constitutes the most dominant architectural potential of the novel.

Science fiction is a gateway to alternative realities that can be conceptualized with imaginary scientific and technological advancements. Therefore, it usually takes inspiration from grounded and realistic impressions. The evolution of classical science fiction towards modern science fiction entails an increasing diligence towards scientific accuracy, care for technical details and close follow-up of contemporary scientific discoveries while transforming them into science-fictional concepts. This essay aims to explore the landmarks of architectural representations of fictional Mars’ structures in science fiction literature and investigates whether the trend presented above is reflected in fictional Martian architectures throughout the history of the genre. Selected works from classic science fiction, modern science fiction, and contemporary science fiction are comparatively analyzed, while the novel by Andy Weir, The Martian, is centered in the focus of the analysis.

In The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, Douglas Adams takes the reader into space to give a clear view of the consequences of urbanization with a humorous take on the intricate webs of bureaucracy. The parallelism between the protagonist Arthur Dent’s loss of his living space due to a council decision to demolish his house for a new bypass and the simultaneous destruction of the whole planet by aliens for a hyperspace expressway draws the reader’s attention to the concepts of building and dwelling. The absurdity of the chaos that ensues despite all planning acts as a reminder of the absurdity of humanity’s choice of priorities in urban living spaces. Adams underlines the paradoxical relationship between the primitive nature of man and his yearning for progress, between nature and modern civilization, and between the desire to build and expand on the one hand and to destroy on the other. Arthur’s journey through space thereby turns the readers into a journey through the recent history of the modern human, guiding them towards reconsidering their priorities in a way that preserves Earth as our home while maintaining progress. In light of these ideas, this article explores Adams’ science-fiction novel as a portrayal of the dire consequences of the use of space in modern urban planning, disregarding the contingent nature of human life on Earth, underscoring the need to grasp the significance of dwelling in a Heideggerian sense of the kind of progress that would encompass all living things.

Perdido Street Station is the first book of the Bas-Lag novel series, written by British writer China Miéville. It is regarded as one of the prominent examples of new weird fiction, a literary genre that utilizes aspects of fantasy, horror, sciencefiction and other speculative fictional tropes. Perdido Street Station is set in a world where magic and steampunk technology coexists. The novel is critically acclaimed for its intricately worked out and richly described setting. The city of New Crobuzon, an imaginary metropolis in the world of Bas-Lag, is the center of the narrative with an immense sprawl of architectural elements. New Crobuzon also has a distinctive geography and habitation: It borrows picturesque elements of Victorian-era London and reshuffles them with steampunk esthetics in all brashness. It blends baroque, British and punk to create a unique urban landscape. This essay investigates the ways in which Perdido Street Station represents social segregation and divulges how governments enforce submission by creating monstrous architectural structures. The architectural lines that determine the boundaries of a city’s different layers and define social stratifications, are also linked to New Crobuzon’s power relations. Such depiction is a reminder of Henri Lefebvre’s notion that urban centers are favorable environments for the formation of authoritarian power, where the depicted dystopian government of New Crobuzon forecloses emancipatory aspirations through spatial control and exercises its authority with threatening urban structures.

2001: A Space Odyssey or 2001, as abbreviated by its fans, is the collaborative effort of British science fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke and American film auteur Stanley Kubrick. Its plot covers a span of 3-4 million years. The film/book was developed from a short story Clarke wrote, called The Sentinel, where an alien artifact is found on the moon. The duo expanded this into a frontier exploring film/book where humanity, which has managed to build a space station above Earth and set up a research base on the moon, is now expanding even further out into the solar system and sending astronauts to Saturn. However, the unearthing of a strange black monolith buried on the moon has significant consequences for the crew and the rest of humanity, since it points to the subsequent meeting location where the next leap of evolution for humanity will occur. Through this plot, the reader is confronted with the common theme of the minuteness of our species in the face of the majesty of these sublime architectural structures, the monoliths. Monoliths emphasize the authority of their existence, the superiority of their creators, and the independence of their existence from time, evoking the concept of “aura” that Walter Benjamin expresses in his philosophy of aesthetics and utilizes to describe works of art. 2001 is a novel/film that perhaps most strikingly depicts the emotion that architects are expected to evoke in their work.